2:36pm June 16, 2014

madeofpatterns-dont-call-people-men-when

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

“Don’t call people men when they’re not men” should really not be controversial.

Yes exactly!

It amazes me how fast “DFAB is not the same as saying trans men” turned into an argument about transmisogyny, when transmisogyny was never mentioned in the original post, because…

It almost seems sometimes like there’s this weird…hostility toward genderless people having ANY WORDS AT ALL to, you know, acknowledge the fact that we exist.

I don’t want to co-opt vocabulary already generally accepted as referring to experience-that-isn’t-mine, but seriously, people act like some of this stuff is already set in stone when it’s actually in a state of tremendous flux (at least in the culture(s) with which I am most familiar/likely to have interactions with).

I think there’s a lot of things in a typical genderless person’s experience that make people very… edgy and confrontational, for some reason. It sometimes feels like I can’t make any post describing anything about my experience of gender or the trans community, without someone finding something to take offense to. And I do mean finding, because the vast majority of the time, whatever they’re objecting to is not something I actually said.

Plus there’s the fact that there are people who want to abolish gender for political reasons. And pretty much any time you describe being genderless, someone’s going to equate it with those people, or their ideologies. Someone. There’s always someone.

It’s really hard to just have a straight conversation about these things. It’s like walking around a minefield.

Notes: